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Epilogue In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his unforgettable report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.1 Moynihan’s claim that the distorted structure of the black family was at the root of racial inequality was not new. Yet the drama the report exuded, as reflected in its use of language and call to action, made for sensational news. For decades, social theorists had characterized black families as deficient, in analyses that veered from biological to cultural to environmental explanations. For Moynihan, the forecast for social change was grim: “all efforts to end discrimination are worthless if they do not address family damage.”2 In a society where the heterosexual married family was both normalized and valorized, Moynihan’s statistical data was damning. He claimed that 20 percent of black fathers were either divorced or “absent” from their children’s lives. Even more problematic, from his point of view, was the large number of births to unwed mothers, a proportion that had risen to almost one out of every four children during this time.3 Moynihan deemed the “matriarchal structure” of the African American family as not only “out of keeping with American life” but also as generating a “social pathology” that kept African American males from securing dominant roles in keeping with their white counterparts. The story Moynihan tells is well known, constituting a kind of antifeminist parable that identifies strong black females as responsible for the black community’s privations, welfare dependence, and encounters with the criminal justice system. This oft-told narrative stands in contrast to the commonly told story from successful black males about the powerfully positive impact their mothers had on their lives. This is not to discount the fact that it can be difficult for boys to be separated from their fathers and for their mothers to raise their children alone; rather, what was most problematic was that the discourse shifted attention away from the racist social structure and limited opportunities afforded African Americans in housing, schools, and employment. 178 The Boy Problem What is not the usual takeaway from the Moynihan Report is its attention to the comparative prospects of black boys and black girls. Even if all blacks were disadvantaged at every step by their family pathology, males seemed to suffer greater consequences than girls, according to Moynihan. Using statistics from 1964, Moynihan showed that although all blacks dropped out of high school at high rates, girls had an 11 percent advantage over boys, with 55 percent of girls apt to drop out versus 66.3 percent of boys. Both black and white boys attended college in greater numbers than girls; what appeared troubling was that although only a small number of white males attended college (12 percent compared to their female counterparts at 7 percent), black girls were almost as likely to attend college as their male counter parts, at 4.1 percent versus 5.2 percent. In other words, blacks did not sustain the same record of male dominance in college as their white counterparts. But even if African American boys entered campus life in greater numbers, girls stayed on and completed higher education in greater numbers. Moynihan cited other data, both empirical and anecdotal, that suggested that black girls were stronger academically than boys. Girls dominated in the small numbers of Advanced Placement classes for blacks. Approximately 70 percent of the black applications for Academic Achievement Scholarships funded by the Ford Foundation were from girls. A young black male, he claimed, was “disempowered ” in the family and found other avenues to “compensate for his low social status” in delinquency. In the midst of the debate that followed about whether black families were really “tangles of pathology,” Moynihan’s treatment of the gender gap in education was largely ignored.4 In an era when both black and women’s civil rights were in question, it was hardly politic to call attention to the inequities in black males’ educational treatment. Moynihan’s report was the first to bring the black family to the fore as a national public policy issue. But, as we have seen, the structure of the black family had worried both white and black social theorists for decades. Black sociologist Allison Davis described African American families as “relatively ineffective” at training persons to “take on the normal sexual and familial behavior of American society” and cited statistical data similar to Moynihan’s, but in 1939.5 At the 1940 White House Conference...

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